Crucible – code review audit trail

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“Didn’t anyone look at this code?”

You’ll do better if you have someone look over your work. That’s what I tell my daughter when she’s doing homework. It works two ways: first, she’s more careful in the first place since she knows it’s going to be reviewed, and second it actually can reveal simple errors that she might have honestly missed on her own since it’s sometimes important to put a fresh eye on things.
The same principle applies in software development. Peer code review has been proven to increase quality. But, generally, it’s a pain to do and not a lot of developers have the time or inclination to embrace the process. That’s what Crucible sets out to solve: it makes adopting the best-practice of code review easy.

Audit Trail for Code Review

But I want to focus on one specific part of Crucible here; the ability to create a durable audit trail for code reviews. “Didn’t anyone look at this code?” I’m sure you’ve heard it, probably shouted by a red-faced dev manager in the throes of addressing a critical bug that was just found in a new release (or maybe you were the red faced manager!) Generally, the answer is something like “well, yes…probably…I’m pretty sure Fred reviewed it last week…but maybe not…” If you use Crucible for the review process, though, you never need to say that.

From any Crucible review, you can access a review’s history from the Tools menu.

And this gives you a slick timeline view of the review.

You can drag and drop the timeline to see what happened when and in what sequence and you can drill into the individual comments. This will take you directly to the line of code under review. With this timeline, you can see exactly how the team reviewed your code.

But the information about your code reviews’ history can also be a useful quality measure that you might want to document and report on elsewhere. With the Crucible review history, you can export all of this information about the review to any reporting tool.

And you can do whatever custom reporting you like from the raw data.

Crucible code review for $10

Just another cool feature of Crucible 2.4. Interested? You can try it out now for only $10! We just added Crucible to our Starter License program which gives you a fully functional version of the product and a full year of support for just $10 – and all of the cash goes to charity (we’re on the path to reach $1M!). Hard to beat that!